By Steve Rhodes
We’ve been remiss with this feature the last few weeks, so let’s catch up. Unfortunately, the news in book review land isn’t good.
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Publication:Sun-Times
Cover: Well, here’s the thing. The Sun-Times doesn’t really have a book section anymore, though it does still carry reviews.
“We’ve been fortunate over the past few years to have had an expanded number of pages to run many full-length book reviews, local author features and interviews when many newspapers cut back to abbreviated reviews or eliminated their book review sections altogether,” books editor Teresa Budasi wrote on December 23rd in “How The Grinch Stole The Books Section.”
No longer. Now book reviews appear in the Sunday Showcase section.
What’s so funny about it is that it was only last May when former books editor and now editorial page editor Cheryl Reed bragged about her paper’s commitment to its books section and attacked the Tribune for moving its section from Sunday to Saturday.
“Many, including myself, suspect the move by the Tribune is merely the first step before that corporation kills off its shrinking books section,” Reed wrote. “Perhaps they are banking that with fewer Saturday readers there will be less uproar about its ultimate elimination.
“The irony of course is that the Tribune is a broadsheet with the Ivy-League mentality that shrunk its books section down to a tabloid, and the Sun-Times is a tabloid with a scrappy reputation that blew its books section up into a broadsheet. In the past year, the Sun-Times has made an even further commitment to local authors, with one- and two-page profiles of local authors Jane Hamilton, Sara Paretsky and Sara Gruen, among others. Each week we offer free local listings of author readings and feature an interview with a local author. We’ve continued to offer our own takes on the big books like The Road by Cormac McCarthy and Rant by Chuck Palahniuk, and we’ve alerted you to the best-selling authors coming our way, like Salman Rushdie and A. M. Homes. We’ve done all this even though we rarely ever receive advertising.
“Concerned about the security of the book pages here, I asked Sun- Times Publisher John Cruickshank, a bibliophile and frequent reviewer in these pages, whether there were plans to cut books coverage here. His response: ‘The Opinion and Books sections of the paper have never attracted much advertising, but they are at the core of any paper’s identity and the engagement a paper has with its community. We are committed to these sections because they are integral to the basic character of the Chicago Sun-Times.'”
Cruickshank is gone, of course (as is the Controversy section, which was the best thing the paper had to offer outside of its investigations of City Hall). But that’s no excuse for the ongoing push-pull at the paper that has done anything but allow it to gain steady footing long enough for its selling points to sink in.
Reviews & News of Note: The last of the old Books section featured Sun-Times staffers picking their favorite books of 2007. (See the Beachwood’s picks by M.L. Van Valkenburgh.) Most interesting, for better and worse, were the picks by rock critic Jim DeRogatis and political columnist Jennifer Hunter.
DeRogatis selected Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. DeRogatis was an investigative reporter earlier in his career and a reporter whose journalistic skills are far more advanced than, say, the kids at Pitchfork.
Hunter selected Carl Bernstein’s A Woman in Charge, a biography of Hillary Clinton that she says was written with “deep sympathy” but which was roundly panned and riddled with errors.
Noted: Steve Weinberg of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors tells Budasi to hang in there. I concur. While she didn’t come into the job with the bluster of Reed, she proved an immediate hit in my book, not just with the section’s contents but with her own engaging column.
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Publication: Tribune
Cover: Borrrrrrrrrrring!
Other Reviews & News of Note: You haven’t missed anything the last three weeks. Well, one exception, curiously buried on page 10 (a 12-page section!) back on December 22: A Bloomberg News review of two books about the United States’s dealings with Iran. According to both authors, an Iranian envoy offered President Bush a “grand bargain” in May 2003 to “open its nuclear program to inspections; to halt its support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian territories; to help disarm the Shiite militia Hezbollah in Lebanon; and to move toward recognition of Israel.
“The U.S., in return, would end economic sanctions and recognize that Iran had legitimate security concerns.”
Wait for it.
“The Bush government never bothered to reply.”
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Publication: New York Times
Cover: Islam.
Reviews & News of Note: I found the lead essay, “Reading the Koran,” incomprehensible and the rest of the package less interesting than I thought it would be.
“Seeds of Hate” stuck out, though.
“The question is not only why, of course, but how: how did these ideas, especially those that portray Jews as all-powerful, work their way into modern-day Islamist discourse?” Jeffrey Goldberg writes. “The notion of the Jew as malevolently omnipotent is not a traditional Muslim notion. Jews do not come off well in the Koran – they connive and scheme and reject the message of the Prophet Muhammad – but they are shown to be, above all else, defeated. Muhammad, we read, conquered the Jews in battle and set them wandering. In subsequent centuries Jews lived among Muslims, and it is true that their experience was generally healthier than that of their brethren in Christendom, but only so long as they knew their place; they were ruled and taxed as second-class citizens and were often debased by statute. In the Jim Crow Middle East, no one believed the Jews were in control.
“Obviously, then, these modern-day ideas about Jewish power were imported from Europe, and [author Matthias] Kuntzel makes a bold and consequential argument: the dissemination of European models of anti-Semitism among Muslims was not haphazard, but an actual project of the Nazi Party, meant to turn Muslims against Jews and Zionism.”
Also: “[Ron] Wood writes extensively about the rigors and comforts of touring, and describes the characters and conflicts of other Stones, but doesn’t say much about the music,” Ira Robbins writes of Ronnie Wood’s autobiography.
That’s about right.
“[He] has had to remind Jagger and Richards how to play the songs they wrote . . . And like any good addict, he has a huge blind spot. If alcohol has had a ‘tricky role’ in his life, then the Stones are a promising little trio . . . Wood admits that he ‘came close to being left out’ of a Stones tour in 2002 because of his drug and alcohol use. Instead, he got sober (temporarily, as it happens) and went on the tour. ‘Now I was taking the music serious,’ he exults.”
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CHARTS
1. Stephen Colbert
2. Glenn Beck
3. Tom Brokaw
4. Steve Martin
5. Tony Dungy
6. Eric Clapton
7. A dog named Sprite
8. A black lab
9. The Supreme Court
10. Alan Greenspan
Posted on January 9, 2008